For some time I have been wondering about the influence of our spirits in our lives. If we believe Joseph Smith we have existed forever as intelligence, and probably for billions of year as spirits after that. I don’t really know what it means to be an intelligence, but as spirits, we were able to make decisions, to learn and understand.

I get the impression as a spirit we were just as we are now, only with a lot more knowledge of things. (After all we had been learning for billions of years.)
Okay, we’re born and we forget everything we knew. Joseph Smith said the soul is the combination of the spirit and the body.

I got up this morning and decided to have oatmeal and strawberries. I had a choice, scrambled eggs and toast – I chose oatmeal. Was that my brain, or my spirit? I remember what I had for breakfast. Is that synapses in the brain or is it stored in the spirit? Presumably the spirit can have memories or we would have had nothing to forget.

We know that if you damage the brain, it has a major effect on the decisions, the memory, the personality. You don’t damage the spirit. Even if you lose an arm, the spirit arm remains. Some people say it’s the spirit that gives phantom memories. I’m told if you separate the spirit from the body, the body dies. According to Joseph Smith there is no life without a spirit. If that’s the case, every animal, insect, even virus must have a spirit. I think that means it must have God Virus parents.

I know enough about chemistry and biology to understand you can make RNA, and proteins, and basically all the things in a virus or any other living thing as well. Is that right? Well, my question, is how much does the spirit part of our soul influence anything – It obviously doesn’t get Alzheimer’s, so it doesn’t store memories, or we wouldn’t forget them. The spirit obviously doesn’t fall into a coma. From Neurology, we know that every function our mind performs can be traced back to a biological origin somewhere in the brain. Frankly, I don’t see any indication that the spirit has anything to do with anything. Is it just along for the ride?

Some say this life is a test. Obviously, not something that any Mormon who thought about would believe. We lived for billions of years as spirits, big war in heaven and if God the Father was once as man is then probably there was another war in heaven long before the one we normally talk about and possibly billions of others. We saw all this and we probably saw billions of billions of people living lives, and for an eternity before that as intelligence, and the fate of this eternal being rests on the activities of an organism and what it did in a blink in time, and the spirit had no control over what he or she did. (Actually not even a blink if you consider death bed conversions.)